Teradata expands Hadoop support

Teradata's enterprise customers have a fresh set of options for integrating Hadoop into their environments.

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Teradata's enterprise customers have a fresh set of options for integrating Hadoop into their environments.

The company this week rolled out a new "Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop," featuring a set of products, consulting services, training and support options for customers seeking to harness Hadoop for big data applications.

The portfolio incudes a pair of premium, fully integrated hardware and software appliances designed for businesses that want ready-to-run Hadoop platforms.

One of the appliances is the Teradata Appliance for Hadoop, which consists of a Teradata enterprise server bundled with a Hadoop distribution for Hortonworks. The system comes with Teradata's Aster SQL-MapReduce and Teradata Aster SQL-H technology for querying and analyzing massive sets of structured and unstructured data in Hadoop. The Hadoop appliance will start shipping in the fourth quarter of this year.

The other special-purpose appliance announced by Teradata this week is the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance, an integrated hardware and software platform featuring Aster's analytic database, SQL-MapReduce and Hortonwork's Hadoop.

Both platforms are designed to help enterprises take advantage of Hadoop without having to worry about integration issues, the vendor says. The systems come fully integrated with high-speed connectors and data loaders for quickly moving data sets between Hadoop, Teradata and Aster environments.

In addition to the two bundled appliances, Teradata this week also announced a Teradata Commodity Offering for Hadoop and a Teradata Software Only option for Hadoop. Both are basically Hadoop software distributions for non-Teradata systems. They allow companies to run Hadoop on hardware platforms from other vendors, which Teradata will then support.

The announcements are part of a growing push by Teradata to position itself as a one-stop shop for enterprise Hadoop needs. The company this week expanded an existing partnership with Hortonworks, one of the largest distributors of the open source Apache Hadoop.

As part of the partnership, Teradata will resell and support Hortoworks' Hadoop Data Platform (HDP) 2.0 on multiple hardware platforms besides its own. For instance, under the company's Commodity Offering for Hadoop option, Teradata will support businesses running HDP 2.0 on commodity Dell servers.

Teradata's expanding Hadoop initiatives stem from the strong enterprise interest in the technology, a company spokesman said on Thursday. The goal is to help enterprises harness Hadoop and integrate it with their existing data management environments is as painless as fashion as possible, he said.

"We have talked with a lot of customers and there continues to be a lot of confusion," over what Hadoop can do and how it can be exploited, the spokesman said. "We are trying to get customers to come to terms with big data."

Teradata's moves are also a sign of the attention that traditional enterprise vendors are paying to Hadoop in recent years. Hadoop started off as Web-indexing technology used by the likes of Yahoo and Google, and is slowly emerging as the file system of choice for enterprise big data applications.

Enterprises have liked Hadoop for its ability to handle really massive volumes of structured and unstructured data in a more efficient manner than traditional relational database management systems.

Though the technology continues to be challenging to integrate and hard to use, interest in Hadoop remains strong, not just among enterprises but also among investors who see it as the next big thing in the data management space.

Just this week for instance, Hortonworks received $50 million in venture capital funding from several existing and new investors. The company is believed to have raised more than $70 million from investors so far.

Hortonwork rivals like Cloudera and MapR too have been attracting large sums from venture capitalists in recent months. The Wall Street Journal estimates that Cloudera has so far raised more than $140 million in venture funding, while MapR has received about $75 million.